Lost At Sea Part 41

"What were the problems?" I ask.

Fabrice sighs as if to say, "Where do I begin?" "They wanted to clear some trees. French law says you have to plant three trees for each one you cut down, not necessarily on your property, but in the region." He pauses. "It was a big problem. In fact, the administration was angry with the Halls because they didn't follow the procedure. We had to calm everything."

"How many trees would they have needed to plant?" I ask.

"Around twenty thousand," Fabrice says.

Fabrice says people basically already have all the trees they want. If you go to people and offer them trees, they tend to say no. And that wasn't the only problem. The Halls needed sprinklers, enough electricity for thousands of visitors ...

"We quickly noticed a gap between the financial needs for such a project and what they had," Fabrice says. "A project like that could cost twenty million euro." Twenty-seven million dollars.

"Was it a big gap?" I ask.

Fabrice indicates with his hands a very big gap.

"But they were really motivated," he says. "That's why we didn't want to say, 'You can't do it.' People have to be a bit crazy to lead these kinds of projects."

I ask Fabrice if he knows whether the Halls' business renting out the chateau to British tourists was a success.

"We know nothing about that," he says. "We know they welcomed people into their house. But we don't know the details."

IN AUGUST 2006, Laura Walsh was looking to rent a chateau for her family holiday when she chanced upon chateaudefretay.com. The site is gone now, but you can still find it on the Internet archive, with its photograph of horses grazing by the lake, plus a list of activities such as fis.h.i.+ng, swimming, a games room, a go-karting stadium, cycling, and a weekly treasure hunt.

Laura phoned Joanne Hall, who told her, "We're not Center Parcs, but we do our best," which Laura took to mean they were something like Center Parcs.

And so, swept up in the lovely-sounding nature of the thing, she offered to pay the full amount up front-$4,000 for a fortnight's stay.

"The first thing we saw, as we walked into the bedroom, was what looked like mouse droppings on the bed," Laura says. "Robert Hall appeared in the doorway. I said, 'There are mouse droppings on the bed.' He said, 'Oh no, no, they're more likely to be bat droppings.'"

"How was he?" I ask.

"Friendly," Laura says.

She ran herself a bath and left the bathroom for a minute. When she came back, the bath was empty and the bathroom floor was flooded. They decided to persevere, and went looking for the go-karting stadium.

"We found it in a clearing in the forest," Laura says. "It was a mess. A shambles. An overgrown shambles. And in the middle of it was a dead goat."

And so on. There were live wires dangling in the outside toilet, the pool was leaking, there was rubble and broken gla.s.s everywhere, and so that evening they confronted the Halls.

"They seemed dazed," she says, "out of their depth. And drunk. They must have known on some level that this wasn't right, but instead of admitting it, there was a restrained crossness about them. Robert kept saying, 'You're just not getting it. You're not getting it. You don't get it.'"

"'Not getting it'?" I ask.

"He meant, 'You're not getting what this is about,'" she says. "'You're not getting how idyllic it is.'"

The saddest thing, Laura says, was that the most clearheaded family member was Christopher, the teenage son. He was the only one trying to make everything OK. Laura negotiated with him, and they agreed to stay a week and get a refund for the second. On day two they decided to try out the games room.

"In the hall right outside it," Laura says, "propped up against the wall, was a shotgun."

"Was it loaded?" I ask.

"There was live ammunition on the shelf next to it," she says.

When they left, Laura let the tourist office in nearby Fougeres know what a mess the place was. They told her they'd had countless similar reports and had been trying to shut down the place for years. It was widely known in the area, she says, that Chateau de Fretay was a disaster.

From August 2006 onwards, anybody Googling the chateau would have straightaway come across Laura's startling reviews on TripAdvisor and Mumsnet: "BEWARE: CHTEAU DE FRETAY!!"

The Halls' neighbors-farmers who didn't want to be named-tell me that very few tourists, if any, came to stay at the chateau these past few years. The Halls' income seemed to dry up.

THE HALLS HAD BEEN in France for only a year when, in 2000, Robert Hall called on Yves Bourel, a local journalist. Yves knew him by reputation, he says, as there had been some excitement locally about the family's arrival. "English people with money usually go to the south of France," he tells me. "We tend to get the poor English people here, because living here is cheap."

Yves and I are having breakfast at my hotel in Fougeres.

"Why did he come to see you?" I ask.

"He had a business proposal he wanted publicized," he says. "He wanted to create a hot-air balloon port from the grounds of the chateau."

"Oh?" I say.

"We have a lot of wind here," he says. "The balloons would have lifted off and ... whoos.h.!.+" He waves his arm to indicate a hot-air balloon flying uncontrollably away.

We laugh. "Did anyone say anything to them about the wind?" I ask.

"Oh no!" he replies. "We don't see rich English people often. So we put the red carpet out for them!"

Yves asks if I've heard the news: The prosecutor has decided to charge Robert Hall with aggravated murder.

THERE'S A BEAUTIFUL double-fronted Georgian mill owner's house outside Holmfirth, West Yorks.h.i.+re, with an oak-paneled dining room, low beams, marble fireplaces. The windows look out across the fields where they filmed Last of the Summer Wine.

In front of the big AGA-type stove in the kitchen, the owner, Richard Skelton, tells me a story about what happened shortly after they bought the place from the bank, who had repossessed it from the previous owner, Robert Hall. Late one night-this was in 1999-there was a knock on the door. Richard's wife, Loretta, answered. Two frightening-looking men were standing there.

"Is Robert in?" they asked.

"They didn't look like normal bailiffs," Richard says. "These were serious, hard men."

Loretta knew something like this might happen one day. They had heard stories from the neighbors. On one especially creepy occasion, the next-door neighbor had had a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The two men standing there wouldn't believe him when he said he wasn't Robert Hall. He had to get a utility bill to prove it.

"There was a trail of irresponsible behavior all over town," Richard says. "Not paying loans back ... And you should have seen the state of this place when we moved in. The pattern over and over is that people would do work for him, he wouldn't pay them, so they'd walk away, leaving everything all rough and unfinished. Wiring, joinery ..."

Loretta told the men at the door that Robert Hall didn't live there anymore, that he'd moved to France. Luckily, they took her word for it. As they left, one of them turned to her and said, quite cheerfully, "Oh, if you ever want someone beaten up, it's two hundred pounds."

Richard gives me a tour of the house. He shows me the en suite bathroom. "They had a corner bath in here," he says, "which was an utter disaster. It was cracked, leaking. The chap who put in the new toilet says it's amazing any waste got out of the old one."